Backlinks should be build to imitate a natural growth of a site. If we translate that into backlink structure, we can understand that monotonous and “too optimal” structures look unnatural.

Lets try to see that by looking at two examples:

Do you see something unusual about this chart? Is it harder to understand? Well it is because it is an obvious search engine manipulation (a bit extreme, but you get the point!). Having only PR5 sites, all dofollow is as unnatural as it gets and will turn on the red light with most search engines.

How should a proper backlink structure look like?

See the difference? You can actually see variety! Although you should decide how to structure the percentages of certain backlink (10% blog comments, 15% do-follow links etc) yourself. Just like in keyword density, there is no correct answer you can have about the percentages. But you can have a wrong answer: Anchor text over-optimization sprinkled with a bad backlink variety.

Funnily enough, we use natural link building and organic results in search engine terminology. But it has nothing to do with nature in the sense that you would be wearing a leaf on your crotch and built links.

Then what is natural link building?

Natural link building is link building that attempts to imitate a natural development of a link structure by imitating a natural rise of popularity in the SERPs by spacing out linking frequency and amount so it looks natural.

Why would we want to build links naturally?

Well, to start, building links itself is not very white hat, meaning it is not very liked by search engines companies who see it as manipulating their engines. To be frank, they are right. Building links is like building votes for your site and you are making those votes yourself. In a way you are faking the popularity of your page! But hey, everybody’s doing it!

How does natural link building look in practice?

Natural link building looks like this:

You keep the frequency of links consistent. It is important to note the dates when you added the links to make sure you do not add too many too fast.

Keep link amount low at the start. No new site ever gets 200 quality links on its day of coming online.

Keep link quality low at the start. You can not have a PR5 package of sites link to oyu from the start. Looks fishy!

Earning backlinks is an expression a lot of white hat SEO’s like to use to describe an emphasis on quality and content and not on traditional techniques such as link building.

The reasoning behind “earning links” is that your great content will go viral, meaning users will begin to share it themselves. In an age of social media, internet and forums, that is not a bad bet. If you want an example, check this Squidoo site i run. I have done one pin on Pinterest. When i checked back a few months later the site had 200 pins and now it has even more. It is going viral all by itself, which is saving me time promoting it. Not bad at all huh?

I would not call earning links alone a good strategy, you need to include a balanced portfolio of links, promotion and optimization to achieve the optimal result. But building links alone, can be tiresome. Why not let other people do it for you?

Nofollow is an attribute of the anchor text HTML tag. As an SEO or someone with web design knowledge you probably know this tag as common way to create links to and from your website.

The nofollow attribute was implemented to limit the wild and absurd spamming of links on forums, blogs, wikipedias and other sites. You can still find an optimistic SEO spamming links around on high PR blogs and websites in hope of raising his websites Pagerank.

Okay so i understand the background, but what is a no follow link?

Well, the nofollow attribute has the following characteristics:

the search engine spiders should not follow this link to its destination (this is a debatable issue, since they do)

the link does not pass Pagerank to the site the link is pointed at

Why is nofollow important for SEO?

Nofollow links do not pass link juice, or Page rank from site to site. That means that simple link spamming will not help much with your position on search engine results (SERPs).

Nofollow attribute is also great at limiting any leaking of Pagerank from your site. Think of every link on your site as a hole in a plastic bottle. The more holes the bottle has, the faster it loses Pagerank (well not faster, but the site authority is diluted).

So as an SEO you can influence your onsite optimization by adding a nofollow attribute to your outbound links. Keep only those links dofollow that you want to pass link juice to.